Huangpu River

Problems associated with water pollution and pig farming in China have been dredged up, but behind the headlines, the story has had a cascading effect on the troubles of the fishermen and pig farmers in the region.

For decades, the river-laced city of Jiaxing in northern Zhejiang province has prided itself as the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party. Now the party's cradle has acquired another, far less auspicious distinction: the origin of some 20,000 pig carcasses retrieved from Shanghai's Huangpu River and other waterways stretching to the coast.

In the past two weeks, more than 16,000 dead pigs have been fished out of the Huangpu River, near Shanghai, and its tributaries. Outraged Chinese citizens have decried government negligence of the environment, flooding online forums with photos of riverbanks dotted with puce-coloured carcasses.

The decomposed bodies of more than a thousand ducks have been found on a river in Pengshan county, Sichuan, following the dumping of more than 10,000 pigs in the Huangpu River in Shanghai earlier this month.

The number of dead pigs found in a river which runs through Shanghai had reached nearly 15,000, officials and reports said on Tuesday, as a newspaper claimed the government was concealing the true tally.

Almost two weeks after dead pigs were first found in Shanghai's Huangpu River, questions about who dumped them, where, and how they died still remain unanswered. So far, about 9,800 dead pigs have been retrieved from the river, which provides more than a fifth of Shanghai's drinking water. Another 3,600 have been retrieved from waterways in neighbouring Jiaxing, in Zhejiang province.

About 9,500 have been retrieved from the Huangpu River, a source of more than a fifth of the city's drinking water, as workers pulled nearly 500 more pig carcasses from the waterway yesterday. Upstream, the government of Jiaxing said it had recovered around 3,600 from streams in its jurisdiction.

The Ministry of Agriculture has sent a team led by its chief veterinarian to instruct on the treatment of dead pigs in Zhejiang after more than 8,000 carcasses were pulled out of the Huangpu River in neighbouring Shanghai.

In a statement released on the municipal government's website yesterday, the authorities said the retrieval of dead pigs from a section of the Huangpu River flowing through the southwestern Songjiang district was "basically" complete. Clean water supplies had been restored in the town of Maogang, where the carcasses were first discovered.

Shanghai residents could be excused for feeling shocked and outraged after the city's waterway was found choked with dead pigs. Over the past week, thousands of rotting carcasses were seen drifting down the river that flows through the city. More disturbing is that little is known about how it happened. Nor do we know what is being done to contain the problem. Given the potential threat to public health in the region, the lack of transparency and protection is regrettable.